Director Eddie Huang on the serenity of never seeking anyone's approval

Pay your dues, perfect your craft, cultivate mentors. All great career advice that I’ve heard over and over in talking to leaders for This is Working. Eddie Huang, the writer-director of the new movie Boogie, has another way he recommends: Shoot your shot.

“I don't know if it's my ignorance or stupidity, but I just do it," said Eddie, look back at his career, which has taken him from selling streetwear to practicing law, from opening restaurants to opening weekends. "I've embarrassed myself and I've failed, and I got a 0-star review when I opened this restaurant, Xiao Ye. But man, I learned from it, and I always believed in myself and I really surrounded myself with people that love me, no matter what. Even if I failed, they were like, ‘Yo man, you have talent, I saw the vision. You tried hard. These were the mistakes. Try again. You got this.’

If you're scared to fail and you're always studying it from the outside but then never jumping in... That was the difference between me and my friends that are creating and the friends that are now accountants or lawyers or just working at a desk. We jumped, we failed and we kept doing it.”

Eddie came on This is Working this week to talk about Boogie, but our sports-metaphor-heavy conversation focused on the path that lead him to get behind the camera. He didn't have the usual director's background: no experience in film and a history of speaking critically about those who backed him. He didn't just the bite the hand that fed him, he seared it. In 2015, when ABC created a sitcom version of his memoir, Fresh Off the Boat, Eddie wrote a scathing takedown of the process and the show, at one point accusing the producer of trying to make, “a reverse-yellowface show with universal white stories played out by Chinamen."

As he burned bridges, though, he found others who wanted to back his voice and vision. That was a good thing, because Eddie's body and brain rejected any attempts he made to fit in. In 2009, he was an attorney in NYC with Chadbourne & Park and found himself rebelling against firm life. “I would do crazy shit, like I gave myself a haircut in the office once, because I'm like, ‘I'm so sick of being here,’” he told me. “ I started selling weed to other people at the firm, and then I would just leave work and go promote parties.” When the Great Recession hit, Eddie lost his job. 

As he wrote in Fresh Off the Boat, he felt "born again."

Within a year, he’d be lauded as a restauranteur, launching a celebrated pork buns restaurant called BaoHaus (which shuttered in October). Soon, he became a man in the media, doing standup comedy and launching shows on the Cooking Channel, Vice and MTV. Next came books and writing. And, this year, movies. 

In each endeavor, there has been one string tying Eddie’s projects together: a search for answers about what it means to be Asian in America and an effort to find happiness and truth in that identity.

As you’ll see from our talk — which you can find in this video or in today’s podcast — the way he explores those questions is to make something new and to refuse to be beholden to people’s approval. The only path he wants to be on is the one he creates himself.

Some lightly edited excerpts:

On why Hollywood was willing to back him now

[Boogie] is a film that Hollywood really didn't understand: ‘Wait, it's a traditional Asian kid that really grew up with Black culture and got guidance from Black culture in America, and then he plays basketball.’ It's tough…

I think that what has helped me is just being consistent and being honest and giving people their room to come around to what I'm saying. Because once they sit with it, they're like what, "If I was in Eddie's shoes or if I was in a part of his community, it would annoy me too the way people are telling our story." And they're starting to see it.

I think there is a bit more duality in America, especially since the George Floyd protests and since the #MeToo Movement. I think there has been a lot of phenomenal pressure on dominant culture to gain perspective and to kind of adhere to The Golden Rule, treat others as you would like to be treated yourself.”

On ignoring your critics and the book that helped him do so

“This book, the Tao Te Ching .. this is not a religion, this is a philosophy, but I think it applies a lot to what people are asking. And chapter nine very quickly says, ‘Fill your bowl to the brim and it will spill. Keep sharpening your knife and it will blunt. Chase after money and security and your heart will never unclench. Care about people's approval and you will be their prisoner. Do your work, then step back. The only path to serenity.’ And now these are very hard things to put into action, and difficult to understand. And I had to remind myself this week, because I will hang on every good review and I will hang on every bad review, and it's tough.

“But then I had a friend, it was actually the actor of our film, Taylor Takahashi said to me, ‘Yo, I've never seen you care what anybody thinks. You just do it. Why is it bothering you now?’ And I said, ‘You know what? I fooled myself. Every 10 years, I'll fool myself.’ I love film. And I love the film community, and I actually really love the art film community even though I'm not really one of them. Sometimes you want memberships, sometimes you want approval, and it was from Taylor and then a lady friend of mine was like, ‘Yo, you never wanted approval from anyone, and just because you like these guys and you like this community doesn't mean you need their approval. You've got to let it go and you've got to stand strong.’ And that's when I went back to the Tao Te Ching, because this is a book I read as a kid that gave me a lot of strength and helped me find myself.”

...and on ignoring your inner critic

“I box a lot and something my trainer, Julian, always tells me is, ‘Don't admire your work. Sometimes you hit somebody, if you leave your hand out the next punch is coming right back. So you throw the punch and come right back.’

“That's really my mentality in life and I think it's served me quite well. I never really admire my work too long. I've actually left most of my jobs, or got fired, and there hasn't been much time to admire the work. [After Boogie] I feel amazing, but I'm more just excited to get back behind the camera and to apply everything I learned. Because you learn so much on your first film and I just can't wait to do it again.”

On what he misses (and doesn’t) about being a lawyer

“I miss working at The Innocence Project. I used to really love working at The Innocence Project and Vanessa Potkin because I really felt like I was doing something good and that was really helping people, and on a frontline level. [But] I don't miss being an attorney. I don't like the environment of an adversarial justice system. I do think truth comes out from struggle and from fighting at times, but I don't think our system works that well. I think we need to innovate.”

On his advice to people working corporate jobs who want to be creative

“I think at corporate, you're really serving a master, and there are so many rules and there are so many rails and there's so many things that you're not allowed to do or not allowed to say. And I think it's very important to just, No. 1, free your mind first, because there are so many subconscious pressures, the wall closing in on you, and you kind of get detached from who you are and how you feel.”

On why we should be obsessed about funding small business

“Since the ‘80s, Ronald Reagan, there's this idea of trickle-down economics and that if you give breaks to the rich then they will trickle down to the poor.

“It has been proven so many times over so many administrations, this absolutely does not work. We need to kind of stimulate business at the lowest working class level, okay, and watch the money pile up. … federalism applied to the economy would put more money in the hands of individuals, enable them and encourage them to open small mom-and-pop businesses. You could even enable small Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, technology entrepreneurs. These things are all accessible now.

We should have much more access to money and grants and also tax-free for the first million or $2 million you make as a small business owner, because if we can generate small business, someone who has $500,000, they're going to spend that money. Someone who has $50,000 is going to spend that money. Someone who has $1 billion is going to sit on that money, right? 

And we talk about experimentation when it comes to federalism. And that's the big thing, states as laboratories, getting to experiment. What better way to experiment than to give money to small business entrepreneurs? That's what needs to happen because we're always giving money to the big guy and it's inefficient, it doesn't trickle down and it just ends up in the goddamn Cayman Islands.”